


Inheritance

by Altonym



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Depression, Father/Daughter Relationships, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 02:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1671851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altonym/pseuds/Altonym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruth Taylor reflects on the legacy of her parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inheritance

It was a holiday, she told herself.

She held this image in her head of her entire consciousness dilating somehow, the whole world spreading out, stretching. She would wake up tomorrow and find that a town a few miles away was now a continent away, that it took half an hour to walk next door. That was what holidays did to you - they made everything huge and endless.

Ruth was not good with holidays.

She had given herself a week - a week to go somewhere quiet and reflect, to think and mull things over. That hypothetical week had turned into two even as she sat on the train. Too long spent as _an artist_ had dulled her, it had polished her to the point that everything she produced dispirited her - she felt as though she trod the same ground over and over, that she had smoothed over particular bumps for too long, so now they were no longer distinct. She needed new bumps.

It was her habit to come home during these times of convalescence. In many ways, her childhood had been blessed, and her old home was the most prominent example. Clustered over on itself like a figure of mourning, it guarded the cliffs of the Pembrokeshire Coast with a steely privacy; jutting promontories attached like awkward limbs to one low main building, in a style now out of fashion. Too many unbroken lines, too smooth a design. High hedges shielded it from the world, as did ancient trees allowed to grow unchecked. Even to arrive there in the first place, you needed to wind your way through miles of forest, rolling countryside, from a county town that was hardly more than a village itself.

It was an isolated place, gazing outward over the Irish Sea in what had always seemed to her to be melancholy. It had always suited her father.

She sat almost at the very edge of the cliff, on a small bench that had been installed years ago by her dad's hand. She was just a stone's throw from the kitchen - apparently a lifetime of service to the Alliance got you a spectacular view. Ruth had a dad and a father; it had never been difficult to distinguish linguistically between them, because they were so much those words. Here, she could recall a feeling that had been with her from her early teens - the edge-of-void feeling, the abyss feeling.

She was at the edge of a great and empty circle, the entire span of the galaxy at her fingertips; it was as if she could swipe from this spot and extinguish a million stars. The rubber toe-tip of her rainboot described the border of a nameless shape, as abstract as a scribbled line figure on a page - Ruth was here and was almost nothing, reaching out at a singularity, the crisp paper-fold edge of oblivion.

She knew her father understood this feeling, as did her dad, but she had not always known.

There was a hesitation, a wall in her brain, when she tried to talk about the nature of her childhood. For one, she resented the idea that some bright-eyed postgrad with two hundred credit glasses would find ways to link every sentence she said to an accusation against her father, or worse her dad - despite their failings, she protected them and their legacy. They had cared for her, with their whole hearts and all their effort, and she did not blame them for her sadness. Who they had been as parents was a direct result of who they had been forced to become, long before she was even conceived of.

Her Aunt Jack had spent a lot of time at the house; mostly when Ruth was younger, because she came to see Ruth. Jack was the first person in Ruth's life who made her feel like a person and not a concept, and her aunt was the first person to see her attempts at writing. She only ever asked one question - "who wrote this?" - and as long as Ruth could answer "Me" and mean it, Jack would gladly read. Back then, it had seemed a silly game. Now, she realised what Jack had been trying to do.

In the present, Ruth Taylor exhaled cigarette smoke. In the past, she sat at a wide teak breakfast table, her plump fingers drumming a disjointed rhythm on the tabletop. She was twelve, and scandalised. It had been sixteen hours since she had decided, on a whim soon regretted, to search for her father's fame on the extranet. He had concealed it from her for as long as possible - he had lied to her, by omission if not by deliberate deceit. Ruth had watched videos of her father in combat, before an accident he never talked about, in a galaxy she could barely imagine.

"You're a murderer!" she yelled, her fingers pulling together, silent in accusation. Her father gazed at her evenly, for a very long time, and as so often he seemed to exist behind some intangible veil, physically present but halfway across the universe. She hated him when he did this, drifted away from her to the point that she panicked, imagined his soul just detaching from his body and disappearing into the atmosphere, a father-balloon never found again. Eventually, he nodded, and moved over to her with his awkward gait, that like everything else about him she could not stand in this one, infuriating second. He kissed her head, echoed "yes, I am a murderer", and left.

Dad had sat with her, at a time that might have been two days or two years after. He had pulled her close - none of the distance of her father, never the same detachment. Ruth had taken her surname from her dad; her father had not wanted her to have his surname. Another rejection, another distancing. She hated him, and she said so.

"I know you do, in some ways," said Dad, and held her hands in his, encompassing them completely. He knew she liked that best, because he paid attention.  
"How am I supposed to forgive him?" She said it earnestly, intently, with all the innocence of a child.  
"You aren't," said Dad, and earned her alliegance all over again.

Present Ruth remembered, smiled. As night approached, the ocean became closer and closer to an impenetrable dark, and her metaphor became reality. She wished her father had explained more readily, she wished he had bothered to defend himself.

Sometimes her father would find her in the garden, playing with the ripped-off heads of his favourite fuschias - she thought they looked like otherworldly four-winged birds, and in her daydream they fought and allied with one another, the spectral royalty of an invisible floral world. When he arrived she would drop the broken flowers, because her father's presence had the effect of dismantling fantasies. She would feel guilty, because after all they were his favourite flowers, but he never seemed to mind.

On these days he would become very grave and hold her shoulders with his hands, and he would stare directly into her eyes, and Ruth would feel these waves of apology irradiating her, and her father would speak too rapidly, as though there was only a short window in which he could communicate with her, and he would say that he loved her over and over again. She hated him then, for not having discipline, for not being able to save the I love yous and ration them evenly across all the other days. Ruth was forced to gorge herself, and then fast. It was not healthy.

Present Ruth felt her most familiar tumult return- she wished that nine year-old her had been more diplomatic, more understanding, that the little girl had somehow intuited what depression was, that she had understood her father's constant mourning. She felt also an ancient anger - because nine year-olds should not have to have such understanding. Her father's failures had forged a smooth metal seed in her stomach, a layered thing whose shiny, flawless steel had been folded innumerable times. It weighed her down.  
  
"You're similar," said Dad, who had his own problems. Dad could never sleep after the war, and he would tell her openly, would talk about the fear he sometimes had, how it was normal, how it was OK. Dad would keep her close, and huddle with her, and be a shelter, and she would love him as much as she hated her father.  
"If either of you were any good at talking, you'd realise how similar." He grinned, which made her scowl.  
"I'm not like him. I'm present. I exist."

And then she had stopped believing that, and of course Dad was right, and all of her father's doubts came into sharp focus and became like an inheritance. She became almost proud of him, fiercely so, and imagined them standing silhouetted at the top of a green-grey hill, framed by the overcast sky. Father-shadow and daughter-shadow, ghosts who stood together.

Her father called her "a full thing", and he would say it with such pride. She did not agree. It seemed to her that the universe was made of emptinesses, and when she was alone she became another. The sensation of her skin fell away, and the whole world became a vast, single space and she a melded space within it. She would sit on the bench at the edge of the universe and imagine falling into the sea, to be gently worn into a tiny bone pebble and shepherded back to shore again. Then she would sit on the stone beach forever, round and perfect and substantial, and her Dad and her father could come and see her whenever they liked.

They understood one another now. It helped once she left for uni, as it so often does. She came back at the holidays and they finally met.  
"I died twice," he said, as they sat together in the thin blanket of summer's end, "and I may be a ghost."  
"You're not a ghost," said Ruth, glancing at him. "We're not ghosts." She was nineteen. They each gave a hand, half of themselves, and gripped one another for a long moment.

"He must think I'm a monster, that I hated him so long." It was sudden, spat into a silence that only a few seconds before had been comfortable. Dad and Aunt Kasumi glanced at one another, and Kasumi gave him a look, and Dad deferred to her, all in a glance.

"He sees monsters, but not in you," said Kasumi, which was exactly the kind of vague non-answer she tended to give. Like her Aunt Jack, her Aunt Kasumi undersood poetry. "He is..." and she smiled, "a murderer. And he believes that is unredeemable."  
"But he saved us," said Ruth, feeling the odd defensiveness resurface. "He saved us all. The whole galaxy celebrates him." They were strange, abstract words, so removed from the gentle echo she had known as a father.  
"He sacrificed himself to do so," said Kasumi, pushing her long grey hair behind her ear. "That doesn't happen without...disjointedness." She seemed to search for the words, curling her thoughts around her finger like a stray lock. "He...he feels that his soul has detached, almost, from his body. That he floats."

"Like a ghost," said Ruth, "I know."

Present Ruth returned to herself, performed a ritual she had grown accustomed to of late. Go through each of the senses, and describe what it is you can feel, how you interact with the world in this specific moment. The firm solidity of rainboot around foot, the smell of competing pollens, sweet and musky and tart all at once. The soft quality to the light, the dimness of an overcast sky. She let it sink in, and then she stood up.

When she turned, her father was standing there. Ruth did not announce her visits, and they never asked her to. The retired Commander Shepard was, at this specific moment, clad in a soft lilac dressing gown and wearing slippers. He held a mug in each hand - one quivered very slightly, and Ruth could see her favourite black tea ripple. She walked forward briskly and took her drink from his weak hand. She threaded her thick fleshy arm through his withered one and they strolled a while, down a stone path through the garden that was the work of a second lifetime.

"How long are you staying?" he said, stiffly. He cleared his throat. "Your dad will want to know."  
She smiled, leading him under a wooden lattice arch threaded with Thessian duskroses. "I don't know. Maybe a while. I'm bored of the Citadel."  
"Gets like that sometimes," he said, leaning into her a little more heavily as they approached the stone steps down to the lawn. "Too many voices, you forget your own."  
"Yeah. Exactly."  
They moved into the wild part of the garden, the bit that her father had left unstructured. It was more biodiverse that way, he would say, bent over in his gardening gear weeding. In his early bloody eighties and still weeding.  
"Well, you're welcome as long as you like." It was the sort of thing you'd say to a distant great-uncle, but from Dylan Shepard it might as well have been a serenade. He was so terrible at this, even when he was trying.  
"Thanks."

There was a long note of silence, as they sipped their tea. After a little while, they stopped by the fuschias.

"I missed you," he said. "Far too quiet here without you."  
"Yeah. Same."


End file.
